Japanese imaginary creatures, such as Byakko (White Tiger), Suzaku (Vermilion Bird), Genbu (Black Tortoise), and Ryu (Japanese Dragon), were handed down from ancient Chinese mythology. Prayers were often offered to these beings since they are believed to cause mischief among ordinary mortals. - reference -

桃山人夜話 Tōsanjin Yawa "Night Stories of the People of Peach Mountain"
- 絵本百物語 Ehon Hyaku Monogatari "Picture Book of a Hundred Stories"
竹原春泉 Takehara Shunsen
a book of images by Japanese artist Takehara Shunsen, published about 1841. The book was intended as a followup to Toriyama Sekien's Gazu Hyakki Yakō series. Like those books, it is a supernatural bestiary of ghosts, monsters, and spirits which has had a profound influence on subsequent yōkai imagery in Japan.

- quote - Reviving Japan’s Dreaded and Beloved Ghosts
Tanuki, the badger-like, shape-shifting creatures of Japanese lore, are a rascally, impetuous bunch. In one tale, a tanuki playfully transforms into a steam train but then gets flattened by a real train coming from the opposite direction. In another, a tanuki kills an old woman and makes soup out of her, then takes her form and feeds the soup to her husband.

Fantastical monsters like the tanuki abound in Michael Dylan Foster’s “The Book of Yokai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore” (University of California Press), one of several books about yokai that have hit American shelves this year.

In June, Zack Davisson will publish “Yurei: The Japanese Ghost” (Chin Music Press), a critical look at the history of some of Japan’s most dreaded and beloved spooks. Both are scholarly texts enlivened by images of the beasts in scroll paintings, woodblock prints and original illustrations.

Michael Goldstein’s “Yokai Character Collection” (PanAm Books) is more pictorial. It has the gruesome look and feel of a Dungeons & Dragons manual, with Japanese peeping toms and anthropomorphic umbrellas taking the place of knights and gnomes. The book’s illustrator, Chip Boles, seemed to have fun imagining what beasts like a mokumokuren, a “sliding door filled with hundreds of eyes,” and a kappa, a water demon often blamed for drowning horses and humans, might look like.

And then there’s Matthew Meyer’s forthcoming “The Hour of Meeting Evil Spirits,” an encyclopedic look at yokai that includes notes on each creature’s appearance, behavior and favorite hangouts. Mr. Meyer’s paintings combine the vibrant colors of traditional Japanese woodblock prints with references to Asian horror movies and contemporary manga. The result is a coffee-table book (self-published) that doubles as an illustrated guide, full of legends and obscure yokai trivia.
Why the recent crop of yokai books in the United States?
Credit generations of Americans exposed to the creatures through a steady stream of Japanese cultural imports. Haruki Murakami has included several in his novels, while hordes have appeared in the films of Hayao Miyazaki (the clicking, bobble-headed kodama, or tree spirits, in “Princess Mononoke”; much of the cast of “Spirited Away,” which won the 2003 Oscar for best animated feature).

Even more have crept into American homes through video games and trading cards. Pokémon, the multibillion-dollar toy and video game empire, bases many of its characters on yokai. So does the most recent challenge to Pokémon’s cultural dominance, the best-selling video game and anime series “Yo-Kai Watch,” which makes no effort to hide its creative sources. All those monsters — altered and cuteified as they may be — have inspired fans to seek out the original texts.

“The students who come into the fields of Japanese literature and folklore as undergraduates are heavily influenced by popular culture,” Mr. Foster, a folklore professor at Indiana University and author of “Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yokai,” said. “They grow up with these things through anime and manga and want to know where they come from.”

Stories about yokai have been popular in Japan for centuries, from the 11th-century classic “The Tale of Genji,” in which they’re called mononoke, or “mysterious things,” to contemporary anime series. The yokai themselves are everywhere in Japan, in films and cartoons, on billboards and even on beer bottle labels. The latest yokai craze began in the 1980s and has been going strong ever since, part of a long history of booms that dates back to the Edo period (1603-1868). Last year, “Yo-Kai Watch” was the top-selling video game in Japan, and there are plans to release the game in the United States this year.

Relatively few of the thousands of texts and scholarly studies about yokai have been translated from Japanese, which makes these latest books all the more valuable to nonfluent seekers of the original tales. In “The Book of Yokai,” Mr. Foster draws from texts and folk tales dating back to Japan’s Heian period, from the works of the 10th-century writer Abe no Seimei (a midlevel bureaucrat who has been reborn in contemporary manga and anime as a young, beautifully androgynous sorcerer) to the tales of the early-20th-century scholar and avid story collector Kunio Yanagita, considered one of the founders of Japanese folklore studies.

New texts and stories are still being discovered and translated, and the abundance of source material can be a blessing and a curse for yokai researchers. How do you define a creature that can vary from period to period, or even town to town? “When I see yokai mentioned, it will often just say ‘a kappa is a so-and-so,’ ”
Mr. Foster said. “So my responsibility is really to complicate that, so that people will understand that a kappa can be many different things, depending on where and when you’re speaking of it.”

There are also beasts whose stories have been lost, but whose images remain, like the tofu-kozo, a bigheaded servant boy holding a block of uncooked tofu. “There’s a number of images of that, but nobody knows why they exist,” Mr. Foster said. “It might have been an Edo period advertising campaign, but that’s all speculation.”

Among the creepiest of yokai are the yurei, spirits of the dead who look nothing like typical Western ghosts. In “Yurei: The Japanese Ghost,” Mr. Davisson, a translator of a number of classic manga, profiles several yurei. Two of the most famous are the tragic Okiku, a young girl who threw herself down a well (or was thrown) after breaking one of her master’s prized dishes, and Oiwa, a hapless wife cursed with just about the worst husband ever (she is usually depicted with her left eye dripping down her cheek, the result of her spouse’s botched attempt to kill her with poison).

Yurei have inspired countless paintings and illustrations over the centuries, but perhaps the most influential is Maruyama Okyo’s “The Ghost of Oyuki” (1750), a portrait that the artist made of his recently deceased lover. Her ghost — long black hair, pale clothing, no feet — appeared to him in a dream, and his painting set the visual mold for every Japanese ghost to come, from paintings and prints to Kabuki characters and horror films. “After that painting,” Mr. Davisson said, “that’s how they all looked.”

Fans love tracking these evolutions over time, as well as learning every bit of information about as many yokai as they can. This might explain why a lot of these books, scholarly or not, have the look and feel of illustrated encyclopedias, with detailed descriptions of scores of creatures.

“When you look at pop culture in Japan today, a lot of it is really based on this desire to catalog, this sort of encyclopedic imagination,” said Bill Tsutsui, a Japanologist and author of “Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters.”

Why do the centuries-old monsters continue to fascinate, even for readers who don’t necessarily have a collector’s bent? “There’s the mystery of the world about them,” Mr. Tsutsui said. “You get that in this folkloric sense of the past: that the real world around us is beautiful and wonderful, and yet can be really horrible, too.” - source : ROBERT ITO - NYT -

- quote - Scholar uncovers the fascinating history behind Japan’s folklore
AMAGASAKI, Hyogo Prefecture--
The secrets behind supernatural legends passed down through the generations are being uncovered thanks to folklorist Atsushi Oe.
Myths
involving monsters, ghosts, demons and other mysterious occurrences have typically been dismissed as nonsense in modern academic studies.
But members of the Research Institute of the East-Asian Mysterious and Marvelous Phenomenon, a group headed by 55-year-old Oe, devote their efforts to studies on such phenomena and creatures.
About 50 members include researchers at universities and museums around Japan, as well as novelist Natsuhiko Kyogoku, whose works are often inspired by “yokai” monsters and ghosts.

“We are an academic society of people who study strange stories in such fields as literature, history and folklore,” said Oe, a professor of ancient Japanese history and folkloristics at Sonoda Women’s University in this city just west of Osaka.

Oe studies the background of mysterious incidents recorded in old documents. He also conducts field research across Japan on folk tales involving gods, Buddhas and monsters.

“These stories appear a lot in old history books, but they used to be disregarded as a subject of scholastic research,” said Oe. “But, in fact, I believe that they can tell us more how people’s mentalities and society were shaped back then.” ...
... For the last few years, Oe has been working on collecting folk tales from Amagasaki.

One is about a “kappa,” an imaginary creature, which was spotted around a pond near a junior high school here. Another is an annual ritual held at a shrine, in which a meal is offered to the spirit of retired Emperor Sutoku, who visited the area while he was exiled in the Heian Period (794-1185).
A team made up of Oe, young researchers at Sonoda Women’s University and staff from the Amagasaki Municipal Archives has collected about 220 such anecdotes by visiting locations told in legends.
Out of those, 100 stories were compiled into a book, “100 tales of Amagasaki,” which was published in April to coincide with the 100th anniversary of Amagasaki’s designation as a city.
“However far-fetched it may sound, a folklore that has been passed down through the generations has the history of the land etched in it,” said Oe. “By exploring the origin of the tales, you may see your hometown in a different light.”- source : Asahin shinbun, TSUTOMU MIYATAKE -

- quote Japan Times - Spooky beasts keep haunting Japan’s art
by John L. Tran
Seething masses of people crushed together in searing heat; empty-eyed wraiths, heads drooping in despair, shuffling to and fro — waiting for the time when they will be released their suffering. Tokyo can be hell in July and August. It isn’t all bad though; there’s an excellent exhibition on yōkai, the various devils, demons and spirits of Japanese folklore, at the Edo-Tokyo Museum.

As a subject of Japanese folkloric studies, yōkai have been defined in different ways, but could broadly be described as “supernatural creatures.” A fairly well-known example is the shapeshifting tanuki, the friendly racoon dog whose figure can often be seen outside restaurants and liquor stores in contemporary Japan. He appears in the exhibition smothering someone with his famously oversize scrotum in an 18th-century manga illustrated by Utagawa Toyokuni. Admittedly, suffocation by a giant pair of hairy balls is not the best way to go, but the manga is purposefully comic and what is evident from the substantial number and great variety of exhibits is that the iconography of yōkai is extremely versatile.
In “Screens of Hells and Paradise,” attributed to the Pure Land Buddhist Genshin (942-1017), .....
..... By contrast, there are several examples of relatively light-hearted taxonomies from the 18th and 19th century. Most likely influenced by the organizing principles of scientific classification introduced to Japan through rangaku (Dutch studies), these scrolls and handbooks of different types of monsters and goblins range from being crypto-medical manuals to ambiguous mixtures of schlock horror and comedic entertainment.
When bunmei kaika (enlightenment and civilization)
became a key objective of the Meiji government, yōkai were a hugely popular form of visual culture but were also marked for extinction. .....
..... The cute, harmless bestiary of “Yokai Watch” date from 2013, and the exhibition successfully shows that there is a long and extraordinary history of mixing the unnatural, comic and grotesque in Japanese visual culture. It is a justifiably popular exhibition, the only negative being the fact that you have to be careful when you choose to go. It can get monstrously crowded. -source : japantimes.co.jp/culture/2016/07/19 -